Over the last few months I’ve received a lot of questions from people about how to run a slam-dunk product launch. Since the stream of emails hasn’t let up, I thought I’d begin writing an in-depth tutorial on what factors separate the flops from the runaway successes.
And while I know that most of my readers already own my guide on how to sell your ebook via a launch, I’m going to cover a little more behind-the-scenes detail here based on questions I’ve received from clients and readers.
If you’re new to product launches, this product launch tutorial will be a huge help to you – but if you’ve been through the process before, keep your eyes peeled, because you’ll find ideas that will make your next launch a lot more profitable.
How This Tutorial Will Make You Money
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to go into detail about how to get the most out of seven key launch components:
- A Product That Sells Itself
- A Growing List Of Qualified Buyers
- An Offer That They Won’t Refuse
- A Sales Page That Makes Them Comfortable Buying
- A Team Of Affiliates Promoting Your Offer
- Pre-Launch Content That Builds Trust And Goodwill
- Emails That Get Readers Off The Fence
Get better at any (or all) of these key components, and you can’t help but make more money.
First up: Create A Product That Sells Itself
If you want people to buy what you’re selling, you need to have a product worth buying. In fact, what you’re selling is irrelevant – whether it’s an ebook, physical product, professional service, online membership site – it doesn’t matter what it is, if money is going to change hands, it’s got to be a hell of a compelling thing to buy.
Most people I see hurt their launches before they even start, because their product or service is based on what they think the customer will buy, not on what the customers really want or need. (It’s an easy mistake to make, and I made it myself – quite painfully – early in my career.)
Having a “good idea for something people would naturally want” is a recipe for failure and frustration. Creating the perfect product for people based on an understanding of their needs, desires, fears and concerns is a much better path to success, and we’ll cover that in detail in the next part of this tutorial.
Next: Build a Growing List Of Qualified Buyers
When I talk to people who are struggling with under-performing launches (or who feel like they’re not even ready to have a launch), I hear the same words over and over again: “I need a big list of people to sell to.”
This is as far from the truth as you can get. When it comes to selling your products and services, the size of your list doesn’t matter. What matters is their qualification for being on your list. If you’re not taking action to make sure the people who are joining your list are pretty likely to want the stuff you’re selling, you’re just adding names into a database.
I know people with lists of 100,000 or more who can’t get their people to buy for love or money. I also know people with 1,000 names on their list who make a comfortable six figures. The difference isn’t the size of the list – it’s that the latter people make sure they get the right people on there.
In this next part of the tutorial we’re going to cover how to engineer your list-building activities so that you’re targeting the most likely buyer and getting them on your list.
In This Corner: Giving Them An Offer They Won’t Refuse
In the old days, simply having things up for sale online was an easy way to make money. But over the last 10 years the bar has been raised, and people expect more for their money. It’s a lot harder to just sell an ebook or membership site or DVD anymore.
There needs to be more in your total offer package than just the product. Notice how DVDs go overboard in adding “special content” to the movies you buy. Notice how good ebooks have worksheets and bonus audios to help you get more out of the experience. Notice how good membership sites have forums, or group calls, and so forth.
What makes a good offer so effective is that it provides so much value that the buyer stops looking at the price, because what you’re giving them is so far beyond the money they’re laying out.
Take How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook for example – there’s a reason that this ebook sells every day of the week even though its $97 price tag is so much higher than the vast majority of ebooks – and it’s the offer. Between the worksheets and the audio and the content, the buyer can easily see that they’re going to learn exactly how to sell a lot more of their product.
In this part of the tutorial, we’re going to go into a few critical details for coming up with offers that make readers say “Where do I sign?”, not because you’re manipulating them with hype, but because you are giving them exactly what they need in a way that is understandable and accessible to them.
Next Out: Writing A Sales Page That Makes Them Comfortable Buying
Most sales pages focus on how great the product or service is with a level of hype or heavy-handed sales tactics that do little but win over the most gullible or worn-down reader. They convey a level of pressure and style that reminds people of used car (or snake oil) salesmen.
Or worse, the person writing the sales page is so afraid of coming off as “pushy” that they swing to the opposite extreme and create such a soft-sell presentation of their offer that people are barely aware of the fact that there’s something to buy.
Neither of those approaches put food on the table (and they don’t exactly serve the people you’re trying to help, either).
Instead you’ve got to make sure your sales page does it’s primary job: making your reader comfortable with the buying decision so there’s no unnecessary resistance to purchasing your stuff. You do that right, and there’s no hard sell necessary.
We’re going to cover how to make readers comfortable buying from you and confident they’re buying just the thing they’ve needed in this part of the tutorial.
Now At Bat: Recruiting A Team Of Affiliates To Promote Your Offer
One of the most powerful parts of the product launch process is your affiliate team (not to be confused with joint venture or “JV” partners, who actually have more skin in the game in terms of creating the product). A good team of affiliates will drive up interest in your launch, do some of the pre-selling for you and lend credibility to the launch itself.
The challenge most people tend to have is getting that “good” team of affiliates. They often associate with people who don’t resonate with their audience, or have incompatible (or heavy-handed) promotion styles, or worse yet – never actually do the promoting when the time comes.
You don’t want to have any of this bad juju going on in your launch. You’ll want to find people who can actually make your launch strong by participating in your pre-launch activities, effectively pre-selling to their audience and getting the word out when the time comes.
In this part of the tutorial we’ll get you on board with some helpful tactics for getting affiliates to build your list and promote your offer in a way that drives real sales.
The Home Stretch: Pre-Launch Content That Builds Trust And Goodwill
If you’ve been online for any length of time, you’ve probably seen the onslaught of sales videos that come before a launch. Often they tend to be nothing more than rah-rah videos that try and build up excitement for this “really amazing thing!” that’s “coming soon!” – but there’s no real substance behind them.
You see these a lot because they work extremely well on the gullible (or the uninitiated). But these fluffy pre-launch buildup videos don’t work as well on people who have seen it all before. And quite frankly, they’re a pretty weak way to start building pre-launch excitement.
Instead, you want your pre-launch content – whether it’s videos, audios, PDFs or blog posts – to be something useful and meaningful to people, something that actually makes them glad they stopped by and were exposed to the content.
For example, I created free workbooks on “A-List’ networking, creating income streams and “playing a bigger game” [click here to see them] as a way to build up excitement for a launch, and people loved it.
With good pre-launch content, people don’t feel they’re being sold, they feel like you’re actually helping them, whether they buy or not. And that builds trust and goodwill that will significantly increase the conversion rate on your sales page and put real money in your pocket. We’ll cover more on this in the tutorial later.
Wrapping It Up: Emails That Get Readers Off The Fence
One of the most challenging parts of a launch for many people is the email component. Questions like “How do I get them to open?” “What if they think I’m emailing too much?” and “How do I get them to click-through?” are ones I hear so often it’s almost textbook.
While all three of these questions are important, the last one is most critical because a lot of your readers will put off opening your emails or won’t be sold on the idea they need to click through to your pre-launch content or your sales page.
If you can’t get them off the fence and clicking, you’re not going to get your pre-launch content viewed. You’re not going to get your sales page read. And ultimately, you’re not going to get your products or services sold.
Fortunately, there are are simple, effective, and non-pushy ways to make those clicks happen and get your stuff sold. We’ll cover that in detail in the final part of this tutorial.
Here’s The Part Where I Tell You What I Want You To Do Next 
If this article is doing it for you, I’d like you to do one simple thing for me right now:
- Click the retweet button below to share this article with others.
(Oh, and if you want those free workbooks I talked about earlier, you can get them right here after you’ve tweeted.)
Thanks for spreading the word,
Dave
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